


Saints and Sinners, New Beginners

by Mortissimo



Category: Hellblazer & Related Fandoms, The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Gen, Ravenscar Psychiatric Facility (Constantine)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22675534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo
Summary: A young exorcist, alone for the first time, takes an assignment at Ravenscar.
Relationships: John Constantine/Marcus Keane
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	Saints and Sinners, New Beginners

The world came back to him in bits and pieces. 

His feet were cold.

His legs were cold too, stretched flat-out on flagstones. 

His spine, a curve down from his shoulders that was undoubtedly going to protest when he moved it.

His shoulders, warm, supported, though the surface they lay on was sharp with bone close to skin and shaking.

There were hands stroking his hair back from his forehead, shaking too, and less warm. 

A voice, rough from screaming, singing soft and tender as a hymn: _I had a friend stuck his works in his eye_ –

Marcus cracked his own eye open, and immediately regretted it as even the dim light of the basement cell lanced directly into his aching brain. The hands on his forehead stilled, gentle pressure on his temples, and the face he'd seen for a split second before he'd squeezed his eyes shut again was creased in concern. Something nearby stank to high heaven. 

"Back among the living, mate? Easy now." The man's voice was all rough, industrial north, but his hands were soft, and Marcus was hard-pressed to fight himself back out of complacency. When he made to sit up, though, those hands slid to his shoulders, quick as anything, and pressed hard. It didn't take much for him to relent and lie still. 

"Demon?" He croaked, sounding at least as rough as his Liverpudlian nursemaid, who chuckled hoarsely in response. 

"Not quite. All human here, don't worry your cracked little head." Marcus tried to shake his head. Somehow, even lying down, the movement made the room spin unseen around him.

"What happened," he hissed instead, "to the demon?" 

"Oh," sighed the man who was cradling Marcus's head in his lap, and from the tense sorrow dripping from that single syllable, Marcus knew already what his answer would be. "Killed it. And her. Had to. I'm sorry." The last little ember of hope left finally died out, leaving Marcus's chest hollow and cold, but he dragged his arm up from the floor anyway, found one of the man's hands and patted it weakly. To his surprise, the fingers he found caught his own and tangled, inescapable and gentle as climbing ivy, and in the cold darkness of his heart he felt a traitorous thread of warmth. 

"How much can you remember?" The man asked, squeezing Marcus's hand, and Marcus shuddered. 

" _Everything_."

* * *

The moment Marcus had stepped inside Ravenscar, he'd known his initial suspicion was correct; this assignment was a punishment. From brief but memorable personal experience, he knew that asylums like this were all oppressive places, as far from the light of God as Hell itself, but Ravenscar was a different animal altogether. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn that the demon he'd been sent to dispatch wasn't the only one on the grounds; in fact he would have been more surprised to hear that it was. The very air stank of sweat and desperation, and shook with screams of the mad and the tortured, and those who were both.

As he moved through the halls, he felt countless eyes locked on him, though all of them traveled as far as his white collar and locked there, screeching or moaning or praying. Almost all. Through the crack in a cell door left ajar (voluntary admission, Marcus thought to himself, horrified), a long set of limbs in dingy white, blond hair buzzed to almost nothing, and the clearest, hardest blue eyes Marcus had ever seen outside of a mirror, sliding right up his vestments to lock on his face. There was something wrong with the man, or something right, but Marcus slowed to a stop and couldn't look away for long, loud heartbeats. Then, slow like he was trying not to spook an animal, the man began to collect his legs together to stand, with the caution of someone in remarkable pain. Marcus, startled, fled. 

He could smell the basement cell even before he heard the creature inside it, could have found his way from the staircase deaf and blind. While at nineteen he was already something of an old hand at exorcism (he had thought, oh God forgive his sin of hubris), this was the first time, since that first time, that Marcus had been sent alone. He had been asking for the chance to prove himself for years, exuberant with the voice of God in his ears, but as soon as he'd stepped into Ravenscar, a little thread of doubt had crept into his soul. By the time he stood before the cell door, it had woven itself into a tapestry, and the sound of the woman's ugly Germanic rasping dragged cold fingernails down his spine. 

It smelled like she had died weeks before, and when Marcus finally dredged up the nerve to look inside the cell, part of him wondered against logic if maybe she had. The whole of the room was bare stone, with the exception of the once-white mattress and its groaning, rusting steel frame, shaking within an inch of its life with every yank of those deceptively slender limbs against the chains which bound them. The mattress itself looked crusted with effluvia even from the doorway, and even the walls of the tiny chamber were damp with fluids. 

"God in heaven," Marcus gasped breathlessly, and all at once the woman's every movement ceased save for her eyes, which slowly tracked down from the ceiling to lock onto Marcus's, and her split, bleeding lips, pulling back from black and glistening teeth. 

" _They send a child to do the Lord's work_ ," the demon growled with the woman's mouth, and Marcus clutched desperately at the thin, hot line of anger that drew from him. Protesting, the knob turned under his hand, and Marcus stepped chanting into Hell. 

He did not sleep more than an hour at a time for the next fortnight. 

A part of him recognized as soon as he stepped into the cell that the only reason the woman and demon hadn't fully integrated yet was that the woman barely existed anymore. In the doldrums, where even the demon seemed exhausted enough to withdraw from the surface, the woman lay catatonic, grey eyes fixed unseeing on the dripping ceiling above her. If she had a name, Marcus did not learn it, any more than he was able to wring a name out of the monster possessing her. The battle had been fought and lost before Marcus had even arrived on the scene, and a part of him knew that, but the part of him that had insisted on this assignment refused to let him rest, roused him from his slump in the hallway and back into the fight at the slightest sign of the demon stirring, and at times Marcus was even deluded enough to think that part of him was God speaking to him. 

He didn't think that anymore. 

At the time, though, he had fought without ceasing, resting only when the demon rested, and even then, fitfully. There were times Marcus could have sworn faithfully he felt eyes on him, apart from the black eyes of the demon in the woman's head, but he knew that to look away would be admitting defeat, and so he refused to turn, and eventually the feeling went away. 

On the fifteenth day of the exorcism, the bed's weld finally gave up the ghost. Marcus, in his hubris, had come close enough he could feel the demon's rattling breaths in the woman's chest, and by the time he parsed the changed tenor of the creaking, it was too late. The demon slipped the woman's chains and wrapped its hands around his neck, bearing Marcus crashing down, where his skull met the flagstones with a resounding _crack_ and he knew no more.

* * *

All of which begged the question: why was Marcus alive? To his body's massive protest, he forced his eyes open again, squinting up at the startled, crooked smile of the man he had seen through the crack in the door. Up close (and the man was bent _very_ close), he looked like he wasn't much older than Marcus, and about as hard-used. 

"Everything up until I hit my head," Marcus revised. "What happened?"

"I was watching you," the man admitted with a squeeze of Marcus's hand. "You looked good. Like you were winning, I mean. Loads better than…" The grip on Marcus's hand loosened, forcing Marcus to tighten his own or lose it. He curled his fingers. The man wasn't smiling anymore, but a light that had threatened to die behind his eyes rekindled, just a little. "Until you weren't. I got a chain around her neck, pulled until something snapped. Easier when they're that far gone, innit?" 

"I wouldn't know," Marcus admitted, barely a whisper. "Never lost one before." That startled a laugh out of the man who held him, though not a happy one. 

"Could've used you in Newcastle," slipped out of the man's mouth, and Marcus knew the man could see it when Marcus's blood ran cold. Of course he'd heard about Newcastle. It was only last year, wasn't it? Hardly any survivors, and the little girl… 

Marcus detangled his fingers from the man's grip, and the man let him go, folding his warm hands under him as Marcus struggled to his knees and shuffled agonizingly backward. What light there had been in the man's eyes was gone now, leaving the facade of him looking as empty as the woman had in the false peace before her death. 

"Did you call this demon too?" Marcus hissed. The man didn't respond for a long moment, long enough that Marcus wasn't sure he'd been heard, but finally the man shook his head minutely. Marcus was almost inclined to feel guilty, but Newcastle had been such a massacre that even the laypeople had learned about it, sparking a new wave of satanic panic that had done wonders for false claims of possession. And they had never found the child.

Shakily, Marcus was able to push himself to his feet. The man remained seated, staring dully at the ground. His dirty white clothes were dirtier yet, shredded to ribbons up his arms and around his bleeding and bruised wrists. A long, shallow set of claw marks traced their way down his neck and into his torn neckline, oozing slowly as well. 

"You might be the only person who deserves this place," Marcus spat, ignoring the twist in his belly, so much lower than where God spoke to him in shouts and whispers. 

"I know," the man answered softly, and as always Marcus left before he could say something he would regret.

It would be years before Marcus heard of John Constantine by name, and decades before they met again, but he never forgot the look of soul-deep emptiness in the eyes of the man who had saved his life in Ravenscar. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title and other lyrics from the one and only song Constantine's band put out.  
> I really just want Ben Daniels to play Constantine, but also what if John and Marcus had saved each other. What a team.  
> I just finished the series today, and I've never seen such blatant shipping as God seems to ship Marcus/Tomàs.  
> I wouldn't expect me to write anything else for The Exorcist, though who knows where the hyperfocus will go.  
> I'm whollyunnecessary on Tumblr (and everywhere else, har har).


End file.
